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Are you using social media effectively?

Aneesa Malik, account executive at Clarke Associates shares her thoughts on best practice for posting on social media by looking at user behaviour.

I recently attended a Google Garage workshop, which is part of a six month Google project offering free digital support for anyone in Birmingham looking to develop their online presence.

During the session, Google certified experts engaged with me and a group of people from various professional fields that all had one thing in common – trying to understand how people use social media.

I was reminded by the Google experts that we live amongst a ‘selfie generation’ and by default, people have become selfish with the information they consume. Most people use social media for a purpose – to access news, information or entertainment, so where do we, as businesses, fit into that?

What we need to acknowledge is, when a user scrolls to a post, one of the first things they will ask themselves is: What benefit will I gain from this? Unfortunately, we have all been guilty of this.

But, how does this change the way we communicate with users? One Google approved way is by understanding and conducting the ‘so what’ exercise. If you’re promoting a service, so what? If that service has been running for 20 years, so what?

It is only when we replace the product/service features with the benefits for the user, will they look to engage with you and your service. If the service has been running for 20 years, great – but the message you want to convey is: We have the knowledge and experience you won’t find anywhere else.

Through this ‘rigorous’ method, we are able to extract the benefits of the product/service to create more user-focused content.

The average human attention span today is around 8.25 seconds – that means you have around three seconds of limelight (and possibly 140 characters) in which to demonstrate the user is at the heart of your business. Go.